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Gerry Adams

1948–

 

In May 1998 the people of Ireland, north and south, voted their overwhelming support for the Good Friday Agreement.  After some thirty years of political turmoil and over two thousand deaths (the majority at the hands of terrorists), this new settlement in Ireland opened up the prospect of peace for the rising generation of young Irish people.

      A key figure in this agreement was Gerry Adams, an unemployed barman from Belfast, who had been a leading figure in Sinn Féin, the party of minority nationalist opinion in the north, widely accepted as the political wing of the IRA.

      Gerard Adams was born in Belfast on the Falls Road on 6th October 1948, the son of Gerard Adams and his wife Anne, formerly Hannaway.  Neither Adams nor Hannaway are Gaelic names, but rather the names of English families long settled in Ireland.  He was educated at St Mary's Christian Brothers School in Belfast.  He was in his early twenties when the troubles broke out in 1969, and he renewed his family's involvement with republican politics.  In 1971 he married Colette McArdle, by whom he has one son.

      In that same year he was interned for suspected terrorist activities, and it was while 'behind the wire' that his political education began as well as his rise to power among Republican ranks.  He was released and again interned in 1973.  Later he was imprisoned, though released in 1976.

      He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly as a Sinn Féin deputy in 1982, and to the United Kingdom parliament as the Sinn Féin representative from West Belfast, but refused to take his seat.  He lost this seat in 1992 to an SDLP candidate, but regained it in 1997.  But, again, he did not take his seat at Westminister.

      Among the leading Sinn Féin personalities, Gerry Adams has also made his mark as a writer.  He is the author of Falls Memories (1982), an autobiography of his childhood experiences growing up in that republican quarter of Belfast.  He has also written Politics of Irish Freedom and Pathway to Peace (both in 1988).  Cage Eleven (1990) is another chapter of his autobiography.  His short stories were collected in The Street (1992).  Yet another chapter of his autobiography appeared as Before the Dawn in 1996.

      Informed observers believe he has long been close to the Army Council of the Provisionals.  Though he has never claimed membership of the IRA, an offence in itself, he understands the outlook, for one of his stories describes in vivid detail the shooting of a British soldier.

      Over the long years of struggle he has moved, as MICHAEL  COLLINS  [3], EAMON  DE  VALERA  [2] and others before them, from the simplicities of physical force to the intricacies of political persuasion.  His experiences have led to this changed outlook.  Though many of this political opponents, north and south, still distrust him, he has exerted a tremendous influence not only over political events in Ireland, but also, through his frequent visits to the United States, over how those events are seen by the Irish-American community and the government of the Untied States.

      The deployment of Irish-American opinion has persuaded a series of American presidents to interest themselves in Irish affairs (against their will in some cases).  But this involvement has revealed in some ways how far apart the Irish and the Irish-American communities have grown.  They think about Ireland in terms of the past, and have little conception of how it has changed.

      Ireland is now a prosperous, indeed, over-prosperous country.  Appeals based on historic poverty have now little attraction to modern Irish people.  When the Good Friday Agreement came into force it left Gerry Adams with the even greater task of leading his party in a new political situation.  But this has been what Irish leaders have had to do in the past, what de Valera had to do in 1927.  He is unlikely to make much headway against the established parties in the south unless Sinn Féin develops policies for a new Ireland in a new millennium.

      This is a striking role for any man who values what he can do for his country, and who thinks, as all leaders do, of the verdict of history on their lives.  Gerry Adams is a man of immense influence whose greatest opportunity may be before him, but only if he can evolve along with the changing conditions.  In the summer of 1998, after an appalling bomb outrage in Omagh by a republican splinter group, Adams finally announced that the war was 'over, done with, finished'.  The promise of peace would have to be maintained with all the influence of his moral authority.

      His future, like that of Northern Ireland, remains uncertain.  Both will be followed with deep concern by Irish people everywhere, many of whom will hope that Gerry Adams will be able to find his way to a broader horizon, as have so many Irish patriots in the past.  The world will watch with interest as Sinn Féin begins to play a serious part in the government of Northern Ireland through the Northern Ireland Assembly.  Whether the men with guns have become a thing of the past in Ireland remains to be seen.